Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) is anxious, as I am sure are you, to avoid
a mass cull of animals if it emerges that foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) has
spread beyond the one farm in Surrey.

During the August outbreak Defra was to a degree sympathetic to the use of
emergency ring vaccination in order to prevent the spread of the disease but did
not in fact introduce such a vaccination programme.

We are concerned that the new outbreak could have a wider spread than that in
August. Accordingly, we urge Defra to introduce without delay a programme of
emergency ring vaccination. This will very substantially reduce the risk of
government resorting, should the outbreak be more widespread than in August, to
mass contiguous culling. Such contiguous culling is not supported by science
research as an effective and appropriate approach and is ethically unacceptable
to much of the public.

CIWF believes that ring vaccination would protect animals in the
neighbourhood of an outbreak, greatly reduce the amount of virus excreted by the
animals and so prevent or substantially reduce disease spread.

The use of vaccination was reviewed by the Royal Society in 2002 and by the
EU Scientific Committee on Animal Health and Animal Welfare (SCAHAW) in 2003.
Both came out in favour of an increased role for vaccination in both routine and
emergency disease control.

The SCAHAW report recommended that "emergency vaccination using marker
vaccines and their accompanying diagnostic tests could be a suitable tool to
rapidly interrupt the chain of infection, thereby allowing an early stamping-out
of the disease outbreak and avoiding collateral mass culling".

The Royal Society report concluded that "emergency vaccination should be seen
as a major tool of first resort, along with culling of infected premises and
known dangerous contacts, for controlling FMD outbreaks".

In conclusion, CIWF urges Defra to commence emergency vaccination without
delay. Such vaccination should be vaccination-to-live; this is the approach
recommended by the Royal Society.